title: Sharing a common language about conditioning requires accurate characterizations of each others' positions: reply to Shanks.
abstract: Shanks' characterizations of the positions taken in papers that he comments on are inaccurate on a number of basic counts. For example, the papers were concerned with human autonomic Pavlovian conditioning, whereas Shanks refers to no autonomic evidence in his reply. Again, the two papers more specifically targeted by Shanks (Furedy, 1988b; Furedy & Riley, 1987) do not deny "that cognitive processes have any relevance for conditioning", but rather advocate that both cognitive and non-cognitive factors play roles that need to be empirically determined for different preparations and conditions. And the characterization of cognitive factors in those papers, contrary to Shanks, is not a teleological, intentional one, no matter how fashionable such teleological forms of cognitive psychology may be among many current philosophers and psychologists. We can proceed towards an empirical resolution of disagreements about the role of cognitive factors in human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning only if we both refer to the relevant autonomic conditioning evidence, and also characterize each others' positions with some accuracy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: J J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Furedy
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001143:Arousal; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D009042:Motivation